By Robin Marantz Henig

The World Wide Web is no longer the male stronghold it used to be. For the first time in Internet history, females make up just over half the people who regularly log on to the web - 50.4 percent, according to a tally from last spring, compared to 45.4 percent just one year earlier.

But going online is, for some women, just another way of putting ourselves, and our egos, out there for public viewing. We are using the web the way we once used the marketplace: to make connections, to cement social hierarchy, and, sometimes and unhappily, to take measure of how we rank in relation to everybody else.

It’s this last reason, the self-ranking, that is the legacy of insecurity that too many women have suffered for generations. What’s fascinating is that in the 21st century, we wired women seem to have found an entirely new way to drive ourselves nuts.

I thought I had seen, and succumbed to, the worst of it with the arcane ranking system at the Amazon.com web site. When my most recent book was published a few months ago, I found out about a "service" that tracks how well any book is faring compared to all the other books that Amazon sells. Once a day, at 7:38 every morning, I now get an e-mail with an updated number - a number that is almost invariably disappointing.

But if you think I’m crazy to subject myself to this daily pulse-taking of my supposed popularity, try this new web site on for size. It has the unblushingly honest address of AmIHotOrNot.com, and it is designed to tell you how attractive you are to a bunch of strangers.

In a twisted kind of high-tech dementia - or whatever it is that makes an otherwise sane adult submit herself to the cruel social judgments - as many as half a million people a day have visited the site since it appeared in mid-October. What you see when you log on see is a series of photos that scroll past one at a time; for each photo, you hit a number on a scale of 1 to 10 that approximates what you believe to be that person’s "hot" factor. The next screen shows how your ranking compares to everybody else’s who rated the same picture.

But the real excitement begins when you post your own picture on the site. Because then you can click on to a little square at the bottom of the screen that will show you how everybody else rated you.

For Diana Furka, 23, her updated ranking - which, luckily, usually hovers at around 9 - greets her whenever she goes online.

"Pretty funny to have that right in your face every time," she says. She says it feels "like watching the stock market on your ticker after you have made an investment, or . . . when you launch auctions on eBay just to see what you can make."

Or like subscribing to a service that reports your book’s Amazon.com ranking every single morning.

Furka’s picture is one of about 70,000 that are now loaded onto the "Am I Hot or Not" web site. These pictures represent 70,000 people, most of them women and most of them under 30, who want to know where they rank on a scale of 1 to 10 - and who are willing to subject themselves to the leers of idle web surfers with nothing better to do than pass judgment on their fellow human beings.

This is not computer matchmaking, which also exists in plenty of variations on the web. (Want someone Jewish? Check out JQS.com. Prefer bisexuals? Try bicafe.com. And for a mail-order bride from any country your heart desires, there’s planet-love.com.) It is not a reality show, in which the person with the highest average score might actually win something of value. It is brutal, superficial ego-busting, pure and simple, producing objective-seeming numbers based on nothing more than looks - and looks, moreover, as captured in a single grainy photograph.

"At first I was shocked at how low my rating was," wrote Stacey, 20, on the web site’s message board. "I'm not a 10 by any means, but Christ, I'm not a 3 either."

Deal with it, came the curt reply from Jennifer Weaver, also 20, whose own ranking is about 8.2. "When you post your picture on a site that's clearly labeled `Am I hot or not’ you open yourself up for scrutiny," she lectured poor Stacey. "If you had a shred of confidence in yourself, you wouldn't give a [darn] about what others think of you."

Well, obviously. But then she wouldn’t be posting her picture on a web site like this, now would she?

Then there is Dave, who asked people reading the message board to give high marks to his wife because she "has low self-esteem." The wife, it turns out, is a perfectly nice-looking brunette in shorts and a tank top, and I gave her an 8. But the rest of this online community dealt her a demoralizing average score of only 2.6.

What will run through the wife’s mind when she sees her rating? What, for that matter, will run through Dave’s? And, more to the point, why is either of them coming here, to a nasty web site filled with irritating people, to feed their fragile egos? It’s the image of folks like Dave’s wife checking out their rankings that most saddens me, since most of them will feel somehow diminished when they read their sorry little numbers. I know, because that’s what happens to me every morning when I check out my Amazon.com ranking, a brief flurry of embarrassment and dashed expectations before I begin my day.

Of course we all realize that these numbers - the Amazon ranking, the hotness measurement - are passive, shorthand, and ultimately meaningless codes for how we measure up, and they take on power only because we grant it to them. But they gain an eerie kind of authority when they are beamed to us across cyberspace. They may tell us absolutely nothing about what we’re truly worth, but these days they look so official, so permanent, so meaningful, that the lesson is becoming harder and harder to learn.